Twenty Years At One Desk

Three shelves, and he knows where everything is on all three of them.

There is a system of colored tabs that he devised at about twenty seven and has never had cause to change. There are four notebooks that run consecutively and are dated. There is a thing he does on a Thursday evening that he has done, in some form, since before he was married.

Twenty years. Probably more.

He is not a crank and he is not a show off. He has never once used any of it to be the cleverest person in a room, and there are perhaps four people alive who know the extent of it, and none of them know all of it.

In February he was doing something ordinary with a passage he has worked on before, and a question arrived from the side and it was this: when did anybody last change my mind about any of this?

He sat with it for a while, because he is honest, and the answer was a long time ago and he could not date it.

Here is the position he has held without ever stating it.

Study is a solitary act. Company is pleasant, and it is a different activity, and it is slower and shallower and it goes where the least prepared person in the room can follow. He has been to those evenings. He has watched a good passage get flattened into an anecdote in about eleven minutes by well meaning people.

So he works alone. And the work is real and it is good, and he has fed people out of it for two decades without ever once telling them where it came from.

And he cannot remember the last time he was wrong out loud.

Iron sharpeneth iron, and there are two pieces of metal in that

Sit down at the desk a minute, because there is a proverb about this and the picture in it is more specific than the way it is usually quoted.

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.Proverbs 27:17

Iron sharpeneth iron.

Now think about the mechanism rather than the sentiment. You do not sharpen iron with a cloth, or with time, or by being careful with it. You sharpen it against something of the same hardness, and the process is abrasive, and it makes a noise, and both pieces lose material.

That is the picture. It is not a proverb about pleasant company. It is a proverb about friction between two things hard enough to move each other, and it says a man does that to his friend.

Hear this at your own desk. You are not being asked to lower anything, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the sharpening between two pieces of iron rather than one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at that desk for twenty years and who raised a question from the side in February.

Now let me take your position seriously, because it is not laziness and most of it is correct.

You are right that study is largely solitary, and the written word honors it, and the Holy Spirit has been in every hour of it. You are right that a mixed evening goes at the pace of the least prepared person, and you are right that you have watched a good passage flattened, because you have and it was.

Nothing in this article is asking you to swap your Thursdays for that.

The mistake is one substitution, and it is small. You concluded from a bad experience of a group that the alternative to solitary work is a group.

There is a third thing, and it is the one in the proverb, and it is two.

Hear this too, and let it stand where February is still sitting. You have not wasted twenty years, and Scripture is what says so. What is written honors the study and never once calls the solitary work a failure, and the Spirit of God has fed a great many people out of that desk, and He is the one who asked you a question about it rather than accusing you.

And now the thing that is actually missing, and you named it yourself.

Not company. Not encouragement. Not somebody to talk to.

You have not been wrong out loud in years, and being wrong out loud is the abrasive part, and abrasion is what the written word is describing and what the Holy Spirit uses. A man alone at a desk can be corrected by a book, and he can be corrected by a text, and both of those are real. He cannot be corrected in the specific way that costs something, which is a person of comparable seriousness saying, across a table, no, I think you have that wrong, and here is why.